Building a Viral Content Machine: How to Make Viral Content & Creatives

Learn how to create viral content, generate thousands of videos, and lower CPMs

The theory sounds simple: hire creators, make videos, get views, go viral, and acquire new users at a low cost. In reality, the execution is anything but that straightforward. 

Over the last years, mobile apps have pivoted from traditional paid user acquisition (UA) due to rising CPMs. As a consequence, a new creator economy is emerging. More than ever, content production is becoming an industrial process that requires systems, workflow automation, countless reiteration, and ruthless optimization. 

“Volume beats everything here,” states Nikita Zatsepin, founder of Creally. “At the end of the day, less than 1% goes viral, so you have to optimize towards this.”

Nikita knows the viral landscape intimately. From Unity’s ad network to building a $2M app portfolio to now running an AI-native influencer marketing platform, he’s witnessed the evolution from performance marketing to creator-driven growth firsthand. His insights, shared on Tenjin’s ROI 101 podcast, reveal the operational sophistication required to compete in this new paradigm.

For mobile marketers accustomed to the mechanics of paid performance marketing, the transition to creator networks and influencers represents more than a changing channels. This is a new economy that demands mastery of content production pipelines, relationship management, and viral distribution at scale.  

Viral Content: The Economics of Scale

When it comes to designing for viral content, the entire perspective changes into a numbers game. For paid UA there might be up to 20 creatives tested and you scale the winners. When it comes to creators however, it requires producing hundreds of assets in order to find the few to break through. 

“You need to reach thousands, tens of thousands every month,” Nikita explains. “Some brands reach out to hundreds of thousands.”

It’s clear that it only works in terms of bulk and scale: 

“So the idea is that you’re paying $10-20, maybe $30 max for one video. This has the same cost as a creative in the first phase of testing. Usually, you wouldn’t spend more than $30-40 bucks for a creative on a paid ad.” 

He continues to emphasize the importance of scale and cost: 

“That’s a lot of ideas that you can test for the budget, relatively cheap,” Nikita notes. “With our apps business, we were able to achieve $0.66 CPM in the US for unknown apps, which was pretty damn good.”

The lesson here: optimize for more shots on goal and speed of iteration, not perfection. 

How To Partner With (Micro) Creators

Finding creators isn’t the hard part; sourcing the right creators for your mobile app and brand is the real challenge. 

“The good pipeline looks pretty much like this: you need to reach out to a thousand people, 100 of them will reply back to you, and maybe out of those hundreds, you’ll probably agree to something with maybe 20 of them,” Nikita reveals.

That’s a 2% conversion rate, meaning to onboard 100 creators, you’ll need to contact at least 5,000. And not all creators, despite wanting brand deals, are necessarily responsive or professional.

“It was surprising to me that most influencer marketing teams still do this manually, which is insane,” he says. “If you want to work with hundreds of creators, there is no way you can do this manually—no way, no freaking way.”

The solution requires automation across the entire funnel: finding creators through parsing public data or databases, reaching them via email sequences that avoid spam filters, following up with non-responders, requesting audience insights via screenshots, and generating personalized offers based on their median performance metrics.

Key Analytics For Digital Content Creators And Influencers

One of the most common mistakes is being seduced by a creator follower count.

“A creator will always try to sell you followers. But, you will always need to buy median views,” Nikita warns. “Never take a look at followers.”

The key metric is median views over the past 3 months. Not lifetime views, not follower count, not even average views. Using the median views eliminates outliers and gives you a picture of the true baseline performance.

“Some of them will work, some of them won’t—it’s okay,” he explains. “With whom it actually worked, my recommendation is try to sign a revenue share deal.”

“If you see the median views are small and there’s a huge amount of likes and comments and shares, it’s weird,” Nikita cautions. “Social media platforms see if a creator has fake likes or followers and usually de-prioritize them in the algorithm or even penalize them.”

An example red flag example: a creator has 2K views but only 800 likes. 

How To Make Viral Content: The Creative Brief

Counterintuitively, the brands and apps that succeed with creator marketing aren’t the ones that give creators total freedom. Rather, they’re the ones that provide clear direction while leaving just the right room for authentic expression. These style guides and directions are usually summarized in a creative brief by the brand or app. 

“It’s essential for the brand to understand what and how they want to sell,” Nikita argues. “It’s very unlikely that someone will understand it better than you.” 

As an app, “you have all this data about competition, things that worked in the past, things that worked well for someone else. You can basically serve all these creative ideas to your creator network, and this is pretty much the biggest value that you can do.”

Using a creative brief aligns stakeholders on the purpose, those involved, and how success will be measured. 

What Is A Creative Brief? 

A creative brief is a document that gives a creator or team everything they need to know to produce a desired outcome. For example, the final delivery could be an ad creative, a campaign, a video, landing pages, etc. 

What Is In A Creative Brief? 

When you care about performance and measurement, the creative brief is the blueprint that ties your creative concept to the numbers you’re trying to achieve, while anchoring creator knowledge. It keeps creators, growth, and metrics all pointed at the same outcome. Successful creative briefs should read like a growth plan. Here’s what to include: 

The sweet spot is providing strong creative concepts or ideations, while allowing influencers and micro-creators adapt them to their personal style and audience.

“The best teams have really strict requirements in terms of what they want creators to do, but at the same time, you should always have some opportunity for free expression of creativity,” Nikita advises.

Provide Incentives for Micro Creators

Flat-fee micro-creator deals usually create misaligned incentives for stakeholders. The creator gets paid regardless of performance, so there’s little motivation from their side to push for viral results.

“We always offer bonuses if the video will meet a certain threshold in terms of views,” Nikita shares. “Once we incentivize the creator to focus on every video—every video must beat the median—this bonus is usually much better than the actual fixed fee.”

Nikita suggests the following structure: low fixed fee (covering basic production costs) with significant performance bonuses tied to beating the creator’s three-month median views.

For top performers, the eventual evolution is revenue sharing, but this only works after proving the model between stakeholders and creators works.

“Don’t ask creators from the first interaction—ask them further,” he cautions. “Once a creator can see the actual value that they can generate, it’s a much easier conversation.”

“If you can go to them and say, “Hey, we made a video with you. It generated $3,000 in sales. We can give you 50% from those sales next time if you want to just give us videos whenever you want. We will always pay you from all these sales attributed to you.” 

Revenue sharing works best with web funnels where you can create unique promo codes, track conversions, and attribute revenue. For established creator relationships generating meaningful revenue, paying 50% of profits creates a true partnership.

If you’re just getting started, another way to approach incentives for creators is offering bonuses if they beat their median by X%. 

Embrace Incremental Uplift

The elephant in the room remains measurement. Unlike paid channels with pixel-perfect attribution, organic creator content exists in a measurement gray zone.

“Content with heavy tracking is often punished by the [social] platform,” Nikita explains. “It just doesn’t really go viral.”

The platforms don’t want brands circumventing their redes de publicidade, so heavily tracked content gets de-prioritized algorithmically.

The workaround is accepting imperfect measurement:

“Teams just measure incremental uplift. You can see the increment in organic growth coming from a particular date. You see the uplift in direct visits on your website or in search.”

Brand search volume, organic install spikes, and web traffic patterns become your primary signals, requiring marketers to get comfortable with directional indicators rather than precise attribution.

Cost Efficiency: Reach a lower CPM

If you’re pushing for cost-effective paid impressions, several advanced strategies emerge:

Labor arbitrage
“You create content in the Philippines and then you hire creators in the US just for posting. You don’t need to pay the guys from the US for the creation of content.”

Faceless content
Supplement creator-led videos with slideshows and templated content that’s cheaper to produce but maintains posting frequency.

Content repurposing
Use Python scripts to modify winning videos (changing speed, filters, captions) and reupload to extend their viral window.

Localization
The same piece of content can go viral in French or Spanish but will never go viral in English simply because the competition in English is much higher.”

Buying in bulk
Pre-purchase videos during off-peak seasons when creator rates are lower, then deploy during high-competition periods.

However, when taking these cost-effect approaches, there could be some risks involved. Labor arbitrage can sometimes result in low quality, while buying in bulk could affect brand safety, etc. 

The Viral Content Repurposing Multiplier

Creator marketing has a compounding advantage that is underused: it creates a two-way feedback loop between what people voluntarily engage with (organic) and what you can systematically scale (paid). 

Organic content is the closest thing you’ll get to market research proofs and results. 

Paid media usually then turns this market knowledge into controlled experiments. 

For example, paid media might use the same message as the organic content, but test a different audience and their ROAS. Instead of guessing what content to create next, you’re continuously converting signals into scale. 

“Some of our customers recruit creators for both things—for organic growth, but at the same time you get some sort of free validation of your content through organic,” Nikita notes. 

If a creator goes viral organically, it validates the creative concept at zero media cost. Those winning videos can then be pumped through paid channels with confidence. Conversely, paid creatives with strong metrics can be distributed through creator networks for organic amplification.

“It works the other way around as well. If you have a great-performing creative in paid, it makes sense to also put it on your company account or give it to creators so they can tweak it.”

Using creators helps you discover what resonates with your audience before you spend hard. Paid can confirm whether a viral angle actually converts, which personas retain, and which promises cause churn (high CTR, low CVR; or high installs, low D7 retention).

Building A Viral Content Machine

What separates successful creator programs from failed experiments is systematic infrastructure. “There is no way you can do this manually,” Nikita emphasizes repeatedly. 

Building a viral content machine requires: 

Sourcing automation
Tools or scripts to identify and compile creator databases based on keywords, niches, and performance metrics

Outreach automation
Email sequences with domain warming, spam filter avoidance, and automatic follow-ups

Data validation
Systems to request and verify audience screenshots directly from creators

Brief templating
Consistent, professional creative briefs with personalized offers based on median view CPMs

Performance tracking
Dashboards monitoring creator output, video performance, and incremental impact

Payment systems
Streamlined processes for managing potentially hundreds of creator payments monthly

“You need to have a really strong understanding of how you want to build the system of tests around this,” Nikita advises. “What is a good test, what is a bad test, how to validate the idea in the fastest way possible.”

Creator Operations is the New UA

Creator marketing is a new growth discipline that blends content production, distribution, and performance-style iteration. As CPMs rise and targeting becomes less reliable, the advantage shifts from who has the budget to bid to who can produce the most learnings about their UA strategy, and turn it into repeatable creative outputs faster. 

“In order to start a company, first you need to start from a content production company and then see how this can extend to other spaces,” concludes Roman, Marketing Director from Tenjin.

The moat isn’t a single creator, trend, or viral hit. It’s all comes down to infrastructure: automated sourcing and outreach, a quality bar built around median views (not followers), clear briefs that translate product truth into creator-native hooks, incentive structures that align everyone around beating the baseline, and measurement that’s honest about what you can’t perfectly attribute—but still strong enough to guide decisions.

For performance and UA teams priced out of Facebook and Google auctions, the main strategy should focus more on volume than virality. Once you have the volume, then you can systemize what works and ditch what doesn’t. So, let organic performance validate your strategies at a near-zero media cost, use paid to confirm impact, and feed these learnings back into your creator pipeline. Hopefully one of your creatives and content reaches the 1%.

The main question when starting your creator strategy shouldn’t be about getting creators to post. It’s whether you can run creator growth with the same rigor as traditional UA, and still be able to handle the 10x creative output. 

Principais conclusões

Volume beats perfection: creator-led growth is a probabilities game, so the advantage goes to teams that can produce and ship massive creative volume.

Systems win (not manual hustle): sourcing, outreach, QC, briefs, tracking, and payments must be operationalized and automated to scale beyond a handful of creators.

Pick creators by performance, not popularity: optimize for median views (last 3 months) and audience quality, not follower count.

Direction and incentives drive outcomes: clear performance-based creative briefs plus bonus/rev-share structures align creators toward beating baselines and producing commercially useful content.

Understand the organic and paid feedback loop: organic validates hooks cheaply; paid confirms what actually converts/retains. Then you repurpose and scale winners across both channels.

Gestor de conteúdos de marketing

Tara Meyer